Greek Lexicographical Notes: A Critical Supplement to the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell-Scott-Jones

Lexicography Is the Unconscious Infrastructure of Every Depth-Psychological Reading of Antiquity

Every time James Hillman traces the word bathun in Heraclitus fragment 45 to ground his entire conception of “depth psychology,” every time Edward Edinger reads the Presocratics as carriers of archetypal images central to the Western psyche, every time Rafael López-Pedraza parses Kerényi’s etymology of numphe to illuminate the initiatory side of the nymphs — they are all dependent on lexicographical decisions made by Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones. Robert Renehan’s Greek Lexicographical Notes (1975) is the rare work that turns its attention to this invisible foundation. It does not interpret Greek myth or philosophy; it corrects the instrument through which all such interpretation proceeds. The book is a critical supplement, entry by entry, to the ninth edition of LSJ, identifying errors in definition, false citations, misattributed meanings, phantom senses, and overlooked attestations across hundreds of Greek words. What makes this philological housekeeping consequential for a depth psychology library is that the words Renehan corrects are not obscure technical terms — they are the very vocabulary in which psyche, eros, logos, and their cognates were first articulated. A wrong gloss in LSJ does not merely mislead a classicist; it silently constrains every downstream interpretation, including those made by psychologists who believe they are reading “the Greeks” when they are reading a Victorian-era lexicographical judgment.

The Phantom Meaning Is the Philological Shadow

Renehan’s most distinctive contribution is his identification of what might be called phantom meanings — senses attributed to a Greek word by LSJ that cannot be sustained by the actual textual evidence. These are entries where a definition has been carried forward from earlier editions, sometimes originating in a misreading or an over-interpretation of a single passage, and then hardening into received wisdom through decades of reprinting. Renehan treats each such case with forensic precision: he returns to the manuscripts, checks the citations, evaluates the context, and demonstrates where LSJ has either invented a sense or conflated distinct usages. This method resonates powerfully with the depth-psychological insistence — articulated most forcefully by Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology — that we must “see through” the surface presentation to the fantasy operating beneath it. Hillman wrote that “psychology is truly psychological only when it awakens to the fantasies objectified in its observations.” Renehan performs an analogous operation on lexicography itself: he awakens classical scholarship to the fantasies objectified in its definitions. The phantom meaning is the philological shadow — the unexamined assumption that quietly shapes all readings built upon it. When Edinger, in The Psyche in Antiquity, claims that depth psychologists must “be familiar with these images and their origins,” the unstated premise is that the Greek-English lexicon has faithfully transmitted those origins. Renehan shows this premise is frequently false.

Precision at the Root Alters Everything at the Branch

The cumulative force of Renehan’s corrections is not additive but structural. A single emended definition can ripple outward through centuries of commentary. Consider how central the Greek vocabulary of soul, desire, and knowledge is to the entire project of archetypal psychology. Hillman’s genealogy of depth psychology — stretching from Heraclitus through Plotinus, Ficino, Vico, Coleridge, and Schelling — depends on reading specific Greek words as carrying specific psychological freight. López-Pedraza’s work on Hermes and the nymphs draws directly on etymological connections provided by scholars like Kerényi, who themselves relied on LSJ and its cognate reference works. When Renehan demonstrates that a particular sense of a word is unattested, or that a crucial citation has been misread, he is not performing a pedantic exercise — he is recalibrating the instrument. The implications extend to every scholar and clinician who has ever reached for a Greek term to anchor a psychological insight. Renehan’s work thus occupies a peculiar position: it is the most technical book imaginable, yet it bears directly on the most imaginative enterprises in the library. It is the optometrist’s correction of the lens through which an entire tradition sees.

Why Philological Discipline Serves the Imaginal

There is a temptation, especially within Jungian and post-Jungian circles, to treat Greek words as numinous objects — to feel that psyche or logos or eros carries an inherent charge that transcends any particular definition. Hillman himself encouraged a poetic, non-reductive relationship with Greek terms. But Renehan’s work issues a necessary corrective: the poetic and the precise are not opposed. Imaginative freedom with Greek vocabulary is only legitimate when grounded in accurate knowledge of what the words actually meant in their attested contexts. Otherwise, depth psychology risks doing to Greek exactly what it accuses ego psychology of doing to dreams — projecting its own assumptions onto the material and calling the result a discovery. Renehan’s disciplined return to primary sources enacts, at the level of the word, the same principle that Hillman articulated at the level of the image: “sticking to the image” requires first knowing what the image actually is.

This book matters for readers of depth psychology not because they will consult its individual entries (though some should), but because it makes visible a usually invisible dependency. Every psychological reading of Greek antiquity rests on lexicographical foundations. Renehan’s Greek Lexicographical Notes is the only work in this library that examines those foundations directly, and its existence is a standing reminder that the care of the soul begins with the care of the word.